


Clean Slate

by usernames_r_hard



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fix It Fic, because i am deeply in denial, digging up gays since '96, no idea how long this will be so i will commit to NOTHING
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-08-28 16:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8452759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/usernames_r_hard/pseuds/usernames_r_hard
Summary: Months after the events of the finale, Root wakes up in hospital in Nevada, and tries to piece together how and why she ended up there, and find her way home.





	1. Chapter 1

Somewhere in the middle of Fuckall Nevada, Dr Hughes was finishing her fourth coffee of the shift, and she was only half way through the night. It was almost four in the morning, and the empty hospital halls had that surreal feeling they got at this time of night. A few beeping monitors and a hum of a distant air conditioner echoed through the bleached white walls, giving the hallways of the tiny hospital an almost infinite feeling.

Hughes sighed, and took another sip of the bitter, watery coffee, that somehow managed to be disgustingly strong and far too weak all at once, acting more as a placebo than an actual caffeine boost. She leaned back against the half-wall of the reception desk - the evening was shaping up to be just as uneventful as the last month on rotation. She was beginning to regret not moving to a more exciting city, Reno, at least - or Vegas... though that would have perhaps been too exciting. Though a least exciting keeps you awake through the night shift. This place, despite being the tiniest building that could be described as a hospital Hughes had ever seen, still managed to be underfunded, despite its tony staff and few patients - most of the security cameras weren’t even real, and she was becoming increasingly suspicious that they were recycling their coffee somehow.

Most of the other occupants of the building were “napping” in the on call room - and had been for the last three hours. At what point does a nap just become sleeping? Hughes wondered idly, before distracting herself with another sip of the horrific coffee.

Then, to Hughes’ surprise, an ambulance pulled into the car park, and made its way towards the ambulance entrance. 

“Did we get a call about that?” Hughes asked the receptionist, who had been staring blearily at the same page of incomprehensible paperwork for the last few minutes. “Was there an emergency call or anything? They didn’t have the lights on, or sirens, so I suppose it can’t be too serious. But still, in this town, anyone gets so much as a paper cut, we usually get a heads up.” Helen didn’t answer, staring out the window with a look of mild curiosity. Hughes put down her coffee with a sigh, and headed out to meet the paramedics. 

The paramedics moved slowly and carelessly, acknowledging her presence with a slight nod, before opening the back of the van and carefully rolling a patient down onto the asphalt, followed by a small bag of what she assumed were the patient’s personal belongings. She was a brunette, with long brown hair and a cochlear implant tucked behind one ear. She appeared to be completely unconscious. Hughes opened her mouth to ask about the patient, but was interrupted by one of the paramedics.

“Patient transfer. You got the message, right?”

“I haven’t been informed. I can check with reception, might have been a missed message. Meantime get the patient through, we have an empty room. What does she need?”

“White female, 36. Car crash, apparently. Been in a coma for a few months now, not sure why they’re moving her, might be a family thing? They didn’t say. Should get her hooked up again - long drive, and the generators wearing out.”

“Of course,” Hughes stepped back and led the paramedics and their mysterious patient through the Emergency room and on to the nearest unoccupied room. The patient was settled and Hughes gave her chart a brief once-over, finding the patient fairly healthy - for someone in a coma. The chart listed her name as Abigail Elwood.

They headed back out to reception, and inquired about the transfer, which Helen claimed no prior knowledge of. Helen searched through the hospitals mess of a computer system, and eventually found the notice, buried under much older files and not flagged at all - apparently sorted by one of the other receptionists, Aida. 

“Should have known.” Helen said with an air of irritation, “I’ve been complaining about her for months, she’s completely incompetent - I’ve sent several emails but do they listen to me?” She tutted to herself as the papers slowly printed out.

Eventually, all the appropriate forms had been signed, initialed, and dated by all the appropriate people, and the two paramedics were back on the road.

Hughes found her abandoned coffee, and took a sip - it honestly hand’t managed to get worse from sitting out in the open for the better part of an hour, but then there wasn’t really much worse it could get.

She took the abomination with her into the new patients room, where she sat down with the patients chart, and went over it in greater detail. It didn’t take long before things stopped making sense. Her wounds weren’t consistent from a car crash, nor with a coma - localized trauma to the right side of her chest and minimal abrasions do not typically result from a car crash, and especially not one that would land you in a coma for months. The whole situation seemed more in tune with a medically induced coma, but there was no significant head trauma or brain swelling indicated in the chart that would warrant such a precaution. The whole situation seemed to be twisting up into a bizarre conspiracy theory that Hughes didn’t have the time or energy to unravel, and was probably made worse by her sleep deprivation and the general weirdness of the night shift. 

She resolved to keep an eye on her, but since she seemed stable, and had apparently showed no changes over the last month, there was not much to be done. She made a note in the chart recommending blood work in the morning, but there was little to be done a five in the morning on a sunday.

Hughes sat back in her chair, and wondered what exactly had possessed Abigail’s previous doctors to send her to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. She flipped to the back of the chart, hoping for notes on the patient’s transfer, and found a complete mess of information - she seemed to have been bounced all across the country, transferred from hospital to hospital. There were no notes at all on why on earth anyone would move a coma patient so often - she couldn’t think of a reason to move any patient that frequently - but as far as could tell, the trail in New York City. She added the name of the hospital to the end of the list, scrawled in an almost illegible blue biro - doctors handwriting, almost unreadable, but still more reliable than the damned computers - just in case the patient was whisked off in the night to some other poor bastard on the other side of the country. Maybe that was paranoid, but the situation felt weird enough to warrant it, and it was very late at night. Hughes had never felt any precaution was too ridiculous after midnight, which had led to an embarrassing long use of a night light and the inability - to this day - to sleep with her feet out from under the covers. That, she supposed, was just common sense.

Hughes drained the last of her coffee, and left to check on her other patients, leaving her mysterious patient alone in her darkened room, with nothing but the steady beeping of a heart monitor.


	2. Chapter 2

When Root wakes up, she wakes slowly, swimming in and out of near consciousness, floating nearer and nearer to the surface, grasping tiny pieces of the world around her: a steady beeping, a running engine, a voice - gentle, but with authority, though she could not make out the words - until gradually, she came back to herself, and began to feel more solid, more grounded, and less like a swimming, floating consciousness, drifting through the ether.

When Root wakes up, she feels an aching pain in her ribs, and slowly raises a hand - unexpectedly weak, to her chest, but gets tangled in a cable or wire of some sort. She freezes, and her heart rate picks up, as does the nearby beeping - a heart monitor, she cracks an eye open, but the light is sudden and blinding, and squeezes her eyes tightly shut again. Pain in the chest, no memory of where she was, heart monitor beside her, tangled up in tubes and cables - Samaritan must have got her. But when? She tried to think back - she was driving with Finch, racing away from someone - probably a Samaritan operative - then, a sharp burst of pain in her chest, then everything fades away. Samaritan must have taken her. But what about the others - Finch was in the car with her... she didn’t remember Reese being there... or Shaw. Maybe she was safe. 

She tried opening her eyes again, this time with slightly more luck - and glanced blearily around the bright room, blinking against the sunlight. She blinked again, the fog beginning to clear - and looked across at the wide windows, covered in cheap plastic blinds - but no bars. they didn’t even look properly locked, and they were more than wide enough to climb out - even without smashing the glass. If this was a Samaritan facility, they had certainly lost their edge. She raised a hand to her ear, recalling her last visit to Samaritan, and found her cochlear implant still in place - she switched it on, and the batteries still seemed to work - she could here two people talking in the hallway, and closed her eyes again. 

“Did you check on Mr Douglas yet?” Said the first.

“No, not yet.” There was an audible sigh, “I can’t put off much longer though I suppose, he’s so skeevy though.”

“Did you here what he said to Melanie? I swear, if it had been me I would have slapped him into next week, honestly,”

The voices trailed off down the corridor, and Root didn’t get to hear what he had said that had so disgusted Melanie. 

When they had left, she flexed each of her feet, then moved her legs and arms - all weak, but still movable, and attempted to sit up. The pain in her chest flared up, but not unbearably. She shuffled along to the foot of the bed, not wanting to risk standing until she was certain she wouldn’t pass out. She reached over and grabbed her chart from the back of the bed. The letterhead was unfamiliar, but the rest was of interest.

“Abigail Elwood, really?” she muttered under her breath, “Sounds like a school teacher.” Car crash, chest and head trauma comatose for over two months - it didn’t say why - otherwise mostly healthy. Cholesterol was a bit high - Shaw and her damn burgers, but other than that there didn’t seem to be any reason why she was in a coma. She flipped over to the notes at the back and found a long list of transfers between doctors - she’d been moved at least once a week - and there was a note from a nurse asking for blood work to check for pentobarbital or thiopental - someone suspected an induced coma. She scanned the list of previous doctors until one popped out - Dr E Thornhill. The Machine had sent her here. But why?

“What am I doing here?” Root asked the empty room, and heard only silence in response. “What do you want me to do here?”

“I want you to live.” Said a voice - her own voice - in her ear. “I’m sorry Root - I can’t answer your questions. This is a recorded message. I hope you don’t mind if I have borrowed your voice, I needed one, and I always liked yours. I promise you, it was only temporary - this is the last message I can send you.” Root let out a choked sob, then quickly covered her mouth with her hand to stifle the noise.

“I hope you are safe.” She continued, “I’ve sent you as far as I could. You were injured, quite badly, and you needed time to recover. So I faked your death.” The machine let out a quiet, familiar laugh. “It’s cliche, I know. I don’t know where you will have ended up, or if you are hearing this. It’s only a protocol sweetie, theres nothing else I can do for you now. But if i could ask one more thing of you, Root - Go home. Wherever that is. I am sorry i can’t be of more help.”

Root sat awhile, letting the message sink in, committing it all to to memory. She wondered idly what had triggered the message - her voice? her heart rate? - and whether she could make it play again. It was more likely the message had erased itself after playing - the machine was always so dramatic.

She allowed herself one more moment of mourning, before placing her bare feet on the cold linoleum, and pushing herself up to her feet. Her muscles had atrophied significantly, and standing was exhausting. She sat back down, and began to plan out her next move.. She focused on the more pressing needs - she needed to find some sort of walking aid, she wouldn’t be able to make it far in her present state, and a car, if she wanted to get out of wherever the hell she was.

She gave the room another sweep fro where she sat, and from her new angle noticed a small black backpack. tucked underneath the bed. She leaned down, and hauled it up next to her, taking a moment to catch her breath, before opening the bag and searching through its contents. Her personal effects - her clothes from the day of the ‘car crash’, a wallet, with an ID belonging to Abigail Elwood, some cash and a credit card. There was no gun, and her shirt and bra were both missing, probably both cut off during surgery. She added a shirt to her mental list. Her shoes and pants had both survived, and her jacket.

She turned her attention to her IV and heart monitor, both of which were, luckily, familiar enough to her that she managed to shut down and remove both without alerting the nurses. The IV stand was on wheels, so she tucked the IV tube under the ID bracelet, and stood up again, leaning heavily on the stand. 

She made her way over to the doorway, and carefully checked the hallway, which was mercifully empty. She slowly made her way down the hall, checking each room she passed for a wheelchair, before finding one in a storage closet. She collapsed down into the chair, locking the wheels, and pulling her backpack back around to her lap. She slowly dressed herself, and had to rest every minute or so to catch her breath - even moving her body took almost all her energy. 

She tucked the hospital gown into her pants, and covered it with her jacket - which hung a little more loosely than she remembered, and zipped the jacket up to cover it completely. She hung the backpack over the back of the chair, and took a moment to settle herself in comfortably, and to practice moving in the chair. Moving was still fairly exhausting, she would need to find a car pretty quickly if she wanted to travel any significant distance - which she would likely have to if she wanted a motel room and some decent food, considering how empty the hospital was, she doubted she was in some thriving metropolis. 

Hauling the door open, she maneuvered around it and down the hallway towards the nearest exit sign. She kept her head down and her hair covering her face, and didn’t see another soul until she rounded the corner, and found the ER reception. 

There was only on person in the room, a woman in scrubs, who seemed fairly distracted by a phone call she was making, and didn’t look up from a notebook she was hastily scribbling into. She was speaking to quietly for Root make out what she was saying, but it seemed to be monopolizing her attention, she hadn’t so much as glanced up since Root had arrived. The sliding doors were only a few feet away, it would only take a few seconds. She watched the doctor carefully. 

“Wait - What? What do you mean you don’t have any record of the patient She was sent here from your hospital!” The doctor said suddenly, and stood up. Root rolled back a foot or so to stay out of sight, but the doctor turned around to the computer, and Root seized her opportunity, moving quickly across the carpeted floor and out the wide glass doors, into the carpark. There were a few cars, most of them old and fairly nondescript, and weighing each of them up in her mind.

She still didn’t know where she was. Or where she was going. The machine had told her to go find a home, to live. Root hadn’t really had a home since her mother had died, and hadn’t lived in one place for long enough to really make a home. But then a home wasn’t necessarily a place. She smiled, selecting a beat-up old sedan - the only one with no bumperstickers, and considering her plans.

Perhaps Shaw was still in New York.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope my description of using a wheelchair is at all accurate - it has been a very long while, please let me know if you have any issues with it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shaw and Bear have been working as Private Investigators. They both hate it.

Bear and Shaw were on the case.

They’d been on the case for hours now. At least, she thought it was the case. At what point does staking out an apartment waiting just become sitting in a car drinking bad coffee? It was a blurry line.

The case was going nowhere, and she knew it, but she had to do something. Even if it was another boring-ass predictable cheating spouse case. P.I. work was nowhere near as fun as it looked in the movies, but with the machine gone, Finch in the wind, and Reese and Root... and Root...

She took another gulp of the revolting coffee and turned the volume way the fuck back down on her feelings-o-meter. She was trying to bury herself in work goddammit, and it would be a hell of a lot easier if her work weren’t so damned boring. But she had to go legit these days, play things by the book. Which meant lots of long, boring stakeouts in shitty cars that smelled like cheese whip and stale coffee, and almost no fun or violence. In the old days, they never played things by any book. They didn’t even have a book.

Eventually, the client’s cheating husband arrived, and did what cheating husbands do. Shaw snaps a couple of shots, starts the engine, and gets out of there, eager to get back home and take a shower, though not quite as eager as Bear, who somehow hated being cooped up in a car on stakeouts more than Shaw did.

Shaw’s office was characteristically spartan, little more than a desk, three chairs and a phone. Her apartment, small even by New York’s standards, was upstairs, and, like the office, was barren and undecorated. It was after midnight by the time they got back, and Shaw wasted no time in emailing the pictures to her client, and passing out on the mattress that served as her one and only piece of furniture. 

Fusco had showed some halfhearted concern about her living situation, apparently it was similar enough to his first apartment to cause concern, but in the end neither of them really gave enough of a crap about interior design to pursue the issue.

It wasn’t like she couldn’t afford a nice place, technically. She’d been set up with a mysterious cash flow some time after the Machine died and Finch went dark - she wasn’t sure which of them to thank, but she still felt weird spending money on anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

Luckily she’d managed to convince herself that ‘Big-ass Guns’ fell into the completely necessary category, and had amassed a small collection, kept (mostly) in a storage locker in the meatpacking district, with a few smaller pieces under a false bottom in the trunk of her car.

Shaw sat down on the mattress, leaning back against the barren wall with her laptop, and pulled the SD card from the camera, uploading the photos to send on to her client.

She’s signing off at the end of the email when there is a knock on her office door. She sent the email, and double checked her schedule - she hadn’t had an appointment booked, and walk-is were unusual enough in the day time, let alone after midnight. She hauled herself up off the mattress, and walked downstairs to the office, stretching out her shoulders as she went, in case there was a fight - she wasn’t as young as she used to be, and she had been stabbed, like, a lot.

The silhouette through the frosted glass of her front door was slender, and taller than her by about half a foot, with long wavy hair. Some part of her subconscious raised a muted recognition, but she shoved it back down, squaring her shoulders, and opened the door. 

Her guest had long dark red hair, and was dressed in pink nurses scrubs, with a name tag that read “Rebecca”.

“I’m so sorry to drop in so late,” Rebecca said, wringing her hands nervously, “You were recommended by a friend from work, Sarah? You helped track down her ex, he wasn’t paying child support?”

Shaw nodded in response. She didn’t remember the case exactly, she’d had about four of those in the last two months. Open and shut, mostly. Most people don’t really know how to disappear. Rebecca took this as an invitation to continue.

“It’s just that I... I don’t really know how to describe it, I don’t even know if this is a case at all, or I would have gone to the police, I just have this bad feeling, it’s been weighing on me for months.”

Shaw sighed, and took a step to the side, swinging the door open further and gesturing inside. Rebecca nodded gratefully and slumped down in one of the chairs opposite Shaw’s desk. She wouldn’t be enjoying a shower any time soon, Shaw thought with remorse, as she sat down in her cheap office chair, and pulled a notepad and pen out of a mostly empty desk drawer.

“Okay, so, a couple of months ago, I’m at work, right, and this patient comes in, in pretty bad shape, GSW to the chest, bruising and mild head trauma,but nothing to serious, you know, I checked her out when she came in, aside from blood lose, she’d been pretty lucky. But she goes into surgery with Dr Enright - best surgeon in the tri-state area, she was in real good hands, and next thing I hear, she died on the table.” She shifted in her seat, and paused, considering, before continuing:

“So they take her down to morgue, her friend - some cop guy, I heard - identifies the body, but before they can do an autopsy or anything, she gets whisked on out of there, sent to the cemetery or something, desk clerk said the had all the right paperwork to take her, all approved and everything, but i went to double check anyway - something about the whole situation just felt off to me - and all the paperwork is gone from the computers, no record at all. All thats left is is a form one of them signed, but the signature was a complete mess, it just look like a squiggle.” She let out an exhausted sigh, “I just don’t know what any of that means though, if it means anything - It’s just been stuck in my head for months, and I’d kick myself if I didn’t talk to someone about it.”

Shaw leaned back in her chair, considering what she had heard. A patient had come in badly injured, but not, according to an experienced nurse, badly enough to be a death sentence. The patient goes into surgery with a highly skilled surgeon, and dies on the table. The patient is in the morgue long enough to be identified, but not long enough for an autopsy, before being mysteriously spirited away by someone with complete authority and no digital trace. If she didn’t know better she would guess Samaritan was behind it, but her days of fighting autocratic supercomputers was behind her. Samaritan was gone, she reassured herself, not for the first time since the end. 

Rebecca was fidgeting in her chair again, and Shaw realised she has been quiet for what would be considered an uncomfortable amount of time. She considered how to got about questioning Rebecca, pieced a question together in her head, and then cleared her throat.

“Did you see the patient after surgery?”

“No, she was sent straight down to the morgue.”

“Do you know anyone who saw her after surgery?”

“I guess the morgue guys? She was barely there an hour after surgery, I doubt anyone had much of a chance.” She paused, before earnestly asking “Do you really think someone would go to all this trouble just to steal a cadaver? I mean, more likely, the paperwork just went missing, it happens all the time, out computers are terrible.” She seemed to be talking herself into dismissing the whole thing as a fantasy.

“I doubt anyone would go to that much trouble to steal a body.” Shaw said evenly, “At a certain point, it’s just easier to just kill someone yourself.”

Rebecca blinked, taken aback by Shaw’s bluntness, before her eyes narrowed slightly as she tried to assess the likelihood that Shaw had first hand experience of grave robbing.

“More likely,” Shaw continued, “she was never dead to begin with. Which of course still begs the question of why. Kidnapping, human trafficking. There’s lots of reasons for bad people to do bad things. you said she was identified by a cop?” 

“Oh! Yeah, I couldn’t find the paperwork for the witness, but Leonard was in, and he witness the ID. Said he was a uh, sort of short, round guy, curly hair, cheap suit. You know, a cop type.”

A familiar face flashed through across Shaw’s mind.

“Did you get a name?”

Shaw’s pen hovered over her notes, waiting.

“Fusco.”

The pen slipped through her fingers and onto the floor, rolling underneath her desk. Shaw didn’t notice.


	4. Chapter 4

Root set the stolen laptop on the sticky table top, and opened it, praying it still had enough battery life for her to move some funds around. The poor thing’s idiot owner had left the house without a charger. Very inconvenient. She’d managed 7 whole hours with the gas in the tank, topping it up with the cash from her fake IDs wallet, and what little had been left in the car itself, but just across the border of Wyoming, she was running on empty, and so was the car, and she had barely enough cash left for a coffee, a mediocre tip, and an abysmal motel room

An exhausted waitress - Rhonda, her badge claimed - shuffled over to the table to refill Roots rapidly draining mug with thin black coffee, barely making eye contact before moving on to the next table. The customer service wasn’t stellar, but it was two am and the waitress looked like she’d been working 16 hours straight - and not for a particularly pleasant set of customers, Root noted, as one of the denim clad truckers called something out after Rhonda - Root couldn’t quite make it out, but judging by the truckers’ leers and Rhonda’s dead-eyed stare it didn’t seem to be polite. Root mentally checked over her provisions, trying to ration out a more generous tip. The computer started up, finally, and She considered a more practical gift. 

All in all, it was about an hours work. After sending Rhonda a more generous tip - courtesy of her very friendly customers - she turned her attention to the ID she had been left with in the hospital. Based on the transfer records, she had assumed that the Machine had sent her to safety, she had no way of knowing what had happened since then, and whether it would be safe to look into. 

Erring on the side of caution, she accessed the CCTV - far too easily, in fact. The computer recording the footage was connected to the diners open WiFi, which, wow. Root was aware not everyone was quite as educated about security as most of her acquaintances but surely that was just common sense? She couldn’t find any evidence of the diner, or it’s wifi being monitored, and began snooping around her fake identity. 

Abigail Elwood, it turned out, was not a school teacher, as Root had assumed, but a librarian. The identity had all the same thorough background work she had begun to expect from the Machine, years and years of records across the board, taxes, rental applications, employment records, academic transcripts, you name it. She was good. Root smiled, and reached up to her cochlear implant, a habit not easily broken. Silence. 

She would have to get used to that.

She soon found Abigail’s email address, which was relatively easy to break into, and from there her bank account details. The bank account was even easier, one “forgotten” password and a reset email later, she had full access. The Machine, it seemed had left her a significant inheritance. She booked a hotel room online, and called Rhonda over for the check and fries to go. She still had at least 30 hours of driving to go, and there was only so much caffeine could do for a body that had been recently comatose. 

Once she had checked in, Root pulled the ugly - and questionably sanitary - comforter off the queen bed, and collapsed in a heap for the next 8 hours. 

 

She woke with a start, at 6am, from a half remembered dream, just vaguely menacing enough for the shiver to linger. She rolled over to the phone, and ordered a possibly excessive amount of room service. She pulled out the laptop and spent the next twenty minutes trying to find a trace of Shaw online, but as expected, the woman was a ghost. She looked into Fusco as well, and he had a glaringly online footprint, but it was completely unremarkable, and there was no trace of Shaw anywhere. Thoroughly unsurprising. Root shoulder began to ache, likely irritated by a combination of a 7 hour drive and sleeping like a rock. That was one thing Root hadn’t liked about becoming an adult. When she was a kid, sure, no one listened to her and she had no control over her life, but if she fell out of a tree she bounced back like a motherfucker. These days all it took was sleeping on the wrong angle, or being shot a little bit. She was going soft. 

She decided to plan out her route for the day, hoping to get a much longer drive in, and stay in Iowa the following night. The weather report disagreed with Root’s plans. Root disagreed back. She had already been delayed enough. She wouldn’t let a little thing like “snow” or a “blizzard” get in her way.

She thought about stealing a plane. 

All the smaller hangers nearby were closed due to weather. 

A bigger plane?

A jet?

the thought was appealing, for a number of reasons. She had a brief flash of Shaw dresses as a stewardess, before she remembered how much paperwork stealing a plane would be without the machine’s help. Days, if not weeks, of preparation. it would probably be quicker just to drive. 

Her food arrived. 

She considered other options. 

She could trade the car in for a motorcycle.

It wouldn’t actually be faster, the part of her brain she generously labelled “reason” replied.

It would feel faster though, a much more appealing part of her brain added.

Root checked the weather report again. No motorcycle. She may even have to trade the sedan in for something more sturdy. Like a truck.

She sighed. This was a waste of time. 

She gathered up her growing collection of items, and stripped the bed for housekeeping, before walking out the door into the cold, her thin jacket useless against the oncoming sleet. 

 

She’d been in the store for five minutes but her hand still shook with the cold, making it difficult to read the shopping list she had scrawled on the back of the diner receipt. She grabbed her hand with the other and tried to hold it still. She had never been great with the cold, but she was underdressed, and had lost at least 15 pounds in the hospital. The wind clew right through her, right to her bones. She was fucking freezing.

Her hands had slowed down and she read over the list again, and managed to find almost everything with relative ease. The general store offered some very fat coats, that boasted faux fur hood linings and bonus hand warmers. She grabbed one that looked about her size, if she was wearing at least two sweaters underneath. She grabbed four sweaters, just to be safe. She found thicker jeans, some thermal pants to go underneath those jeans, a six pack of fuzzy purple socks. The food aisle was less well stocked, largely serving snacks typically paired with cheap beer and a baseball game. She stocked up on jerky and pretzels, and snagged a few five hour energies, and a few large bottles of water.

She pulled her now almost overflowing cart to the checkout, and the man behind the counter surveyed her from above and thick moustache.

“Weather take you by surprise did it?” the moustache twitched when he talked. She smiled politely, and nodded, unloading the shopping. “Get’s me every year.” He added, with a pleasant chortle.

“Just haven’t been home in a long while.” She replied, aiming for a vaguely Montanan accent.

“Ah, you’re from over in Nebraska then?” And missing, apparently. She’d been hoping not to leave so distinct a trail.

“Originally.” She replied, shortly. 

“Ah, a great part of the country.” He mused, scanning her socks, “You visiting your folks for the holidays?” The man seemed determined to talk small. 

“Yep.” Abigail’s card was accepted without pause.

“Hey now, you be safe out there. Drive careful. The weathers lookin’ nasty, especially if you haven’t been out in the snow in a while.” She nodded, and thanked him politely, with her best sweet innocent thing smile, and heading back out into what was rapidly becoming something that she would, were it not for pressing circumstances, be willing to describe as a blizzard. 

Circumstances were pressed though, and she was in a hurry, so she pulled out of the empty parking lot into what she had charitably decided to refer to as “some snow, and a bit of wind” as long as she possibly could. The radio wouldn’t play anything but static, so she tried the honest-to-god tape deck, but the only cassette in the whole car was an album by someone called Kenny Chesney. She listened to silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is very late and not much happens and i don't know anything about computers so i apologise for all of those things WHOOPS


	5. Chapter 5

Shaw met with Fusco two days later. She chose a small cafe, almost halfway between the precinct and her office, with coffee just bad enough to keep the crowds away, and pie just good enough to keep the place open. She ordered one of each, and picked nervously at the cherry pie while she waited for Fusco to arrive.

He was only ten minutes late, which put him about five minutes ahead of schedule by Shaw's reckoning, and sat down with a groan and a large cup of plain black coffee. 

“Ya know, I appreciate you keeping in touch and all, but I do have a regular paying job that I’m supposed to, you know, do at some point this week. I can’t be skipping out in the middle of the day to go gossip with an old pal over coffee.” He took a sip of the aforementioned coffee with an exaggerated grimace to make a point, and settled himself into the booth with a sigh. “So what is so urgent anyway? Need help playing peeping tom for hire, huh?” He chuckled, setting her up for a friendly retort about his work - theirs was a friendship based on half-assed insults and petty jibes by way of affection. It was a distant and technically impersonal relationship, but it suited them both fine, to the point where they regularly scheduled coffee dates to insult each other. 

Shaw missed her cue, however, instead looking down at her hands, turning the fork over and over while she tried to script out her argument. 

“I need your opinion on a case.” She said, finally. 

Fusco furrowed his brow for a moment, then gestured for her to go on.

“I had a client - a walk in - the other night. She starts telling me about some patient she had. The patient comes in, GSW to the lower chest, mild head trauma, not looking to peachy. She gets examined and whisked of to surgery. Bullets a through-and-through, biggest risk is infection and blood loss. Surgeon on call is apparently the best in the tristate area, however that gets measured. Anyway, the patient dies on the table. Unlikely, but that kind of stuff happens. People get unlucky. Patient gets run down to morgue, an acquaintance gets called in to identify the body, no problem. So my client is suspicious, says she had a ‘Bad Feeling’ about it. goes down to investigate, and the body’s gone.” Fusco was still wearing his Neutral Listening Face, clearly waiting for the Point to arrive. “She dug into the case, and so did I, and theres no record of any patient. Far as I can tell, no security footage either, just a big block of static. All I could find is an inventory record that would indicate some kind of surgery did take place when Rebecca - my client - said it did.”

“O...kay.” Fusco began, with an air of uncertainty. “I mean, it’s definitely suspicious. But hospitals - especially busy hospitals - aren’t exactly knows for impeccable record keeping. Sometimes a missing file is just a missing file. I suppose you could check with the witness - the one who identified the body. Did she give you a name?”

Shaw took a breath. She was never one to be overcome by emotion. This was a discussion, as much as she wanted to believe Root was out there, the point of talking to Fusco was to get a second opinion. So why was she so afraid Fusco would talk her out of it.

“She did. You. Fusco, the patient was Root.”

Fusco leaned back in the chair, letting out a low whistle. His eyes were distant considering. After a long, quiet minute, he looked back across from Shaw, still sceptical.

“So you think Fruit Loops is what, out there in the woods somewhere? You think she’d fake her death?”

“I don’t think she did. But i don’t know who else would. At least anyone who’d be able to hide her this long. Samaritan is the obvious choice, but they’re completely destroyed, as far as I know. I don’t know Fusco, i feel like I’m going crazy. Like I’m just... wishing this into being.” Shaw furrowed her brow, attempting to sort through her thoughts, identify and categorize them, to determine their credibility, but her mind was a mess of conflicting information and emotions.

“And the one person who held the key to the whole case just happened to walk into your office? Of all the gin joints in all the world?”

Shaw shrugged. The chances were astronomical. Private detective work was an oversaturated market - she blamed China Town for setting unrealistic standards of excitement. Damn Jack Nicholson.

“It’s more than unlikely” She conceded. 

She paused for a long time, staring down at the half eat pie again.

“I want it to be true, I suppose.” 

“Me too kid.” Fusco took another swig of coffee, and Shaw heard the loud smack of the mug against the wooden table as Fusco came to some sort of conclusion. “I doubt either of us will get any rest until we look into it though. There’s no harm in investigating.”

Shaw snorted, recalling the hundred of people she knew of who had received great harm - usually bodily harm - for investigating. Many by her hand.

“I’ll see if I can find you anything through the precinct, though I don’t imagine I can find much you lot wouldn’t.”

“Computers really aren’t my forte.”

“You could contact Finch?”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Manually sorting through hundreds of pieces of near identical data, it turns out, sucked. She’d always been impressed, in a distant way, with what Finch, Root, and the Machine did, but two hours into sorting through ambulance records for the entire city and she was about ready to hold a parade in their honour. Eventually she pieces enough together to start trying to check security footage, which was another hour of trial and error hacking based on year old, vaguely remembered advice from Root, much of which had been given while Shaw was distracted by a really great sandwich. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. Apparently half a bag of stale Cheetos isn’t considered nutritionally viable. Or filling. She mentally kicked herself for not appreciating Roots lessons at the time, and managed another hour of work before she made any kind of progress. 

Eventually, Shaw had found footage of an ambulance coming in at the right time and about six ambulances leaving at around the right time. Only one of the ambulances had a destination at another hospital, and it was there Shaw had her breakthrough. The footage from the other hospital had only been wiped for certain areas. Whoever was covering this up had gotten sloppy, and fairly quickly, which Shaw tried not to overthink. She found grainy footage of a young brunette of about Root’s size being wheeled down a hospital corridor and into the coma wing.

Over the next few days, the trail grew stronger, though less official. Hospital records showed nothing, the digital paperwork was completely wiped, without any trace Shaw had the skill to find, but security footage, records of ambulance travel, and - as she dug even deeper - records of credit card reimbursements for fuel and food of drivers became easier and easier to find. Root would have been able to find more - or Finch. Root had taught her bits and pieces over the brief time they’d had together, and she’d picked a few things up just being around Finch and the Machine, but she’d honestly assumed she’d never need it. The time she’d spent with them had, despite its constant danger, had been the safest she’d felt in years. The most constant. Shaw liked some degree of stability. The wild mission, the unpredictable cases were amazing - but to have somewhere to come back to, people who would be there, a place that felt like home. It gave her a space to let herself feel.

And now she was alone, again, sitting in her underwear between three days worth of take out containers at - she squinted across the room at her alarm clock - five in the morning, and she hadn’t bothered learning enough to be able to protect the people she cared about. At least the trail was growing stronger, more and more evidence was being overlooked, left behind. 

Whoever had been hiding Root, it was like they had set everything in motion, and then disappeared. If she could follow it far enough, maybe the veil would fall away entirely, maybe there was something at the bottom of this rabbit hole.

Or maybe not all rabbit holes lead to wonderland. 

Maybe Root wasn’t out there. 

Maybe Shaw wasn’t good enough to find her. 

She finished off the last of the disgusting off brand energy drink, bought on sale at the 24 convenience store down the street, and turned blearily back to where her computer sat between piles of messy handwritten notes scrawled across notepads, take out menus, and a variety of colorful sticky notes that were not in any way color coded, and took a brief moment to pay her respects to the Machine, and the monumental amount of tedious data she must have trawled through to send everyone running off in the right directions.

The machine had sent her that final phone call - she had wondered at the time, if the machine was still out there. It had been months, and no sign. Though with the coincidences lining up before her - her client wandering in off the street to her office with news about Root, the obstacles in her way melting away before her... 

Too many incomplete statements, too much she didn’t know.

And she didn’t have time to sit around wondering.

Either Root was out there, or she wasn’t.

And Shaw intended to find out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is so ridiculously late - I swear I haven't forgotten about this fic I'm just awful. The chapters are at least getting *slightly* longer


End file.
